...For the Love of Fine Words.
Welcome to Between the Lines. This blog is dedicated to the discussion of the art of writing in its many forms. Thanks for visiting.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The Wit and Wisdom of Irish Writers

It’s St. Patrick’s Day; which means that where I
live it’s time for green beer, green frosted cookies, and green-dyed carnations;
all colorfully commemorating the Emerald Isle and her patron saint who supposedly
shooed away serpents from her shores, and held up the shamrock to illustrate
the Holy Trinity.

Whatever else may or may not be true, the fabled
Irish silver tongue manifests itself in its gifted writers – in their sparkling
wit, poetic imagination, and profound contributions to Literature.

“When a true genius appears, you can know him by
this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” - Jonathan
Swift

Here, we have the title
origin of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel.

“This wallpaper is dreadful; one of us will have to
go.” - Oscar Wilde

These were supposedly Wilde’s
last words.

“People who say it cannot be done should not
interrupt those who are doing it.” - George Bernard Shaw

Eccentric, but holding
true to his convictions, Shaw left a sizeable amount of his estate to the
creation of a new alphabet.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country
there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of
nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” - James
Joyce

From Joyce’s opus “Ulysses”

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered
coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing.”

- - William Butler Yeats

Cormac McCarthy took
the title for his book, “No County for Old Men” from the first line of this
poem.

“I want you to believe…to believe in things you
cannot.” - Bram Stoker

From ‘Dracula’

“I think
being a woman is like being Irish…Everyone says you are important and nice, but
you take second place all the time.” – Iris Murdoch

Murdoch won the Booker
Prize in 1978 for ‘The Sea, The Sea’.

“Try again.
Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

From ‘Worstward Ho’

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the
world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going
on in the world.” - Seamus Heaney

Heaney was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

“There’s no possibility of being witty without a
little ill-nature.” - Richard Sheridan

Sheridan, this very
witty poet and playwright is remembered most for his plays, ‘The Rivals’ and ‘The
School for Scandal’.